Millennials represent a major shift in America’s social consciousness. Shaped by the financial crisis, millennials are distrustful of corporations and governments, dismissive of materialism, and secular. Those three things combine to create a marketing nightmare for holiday retailers, which is why they’ve largely ignored this massive portion of the population.
Fortunately, it’s not actually impossible to sell to millennials, they just have different priorities than their parents and grandparents.
Focus on the Web
Most millennials will do their holiday shopping on their phones from home, or on the go this year. Many won’t set foot in a store at all. Because of this, the number one rule for marketing to millennials is to be internet and mobile-friendly. If you’re not accessible online over the phone, you might as well not exist at all as far as America’s young adults are concerned.
Break Tradition
Millennials aren’t as family oriented as their parents or their older Gen X siblings. That doesn’t mean, however, that they aren’t interested in celebrating the holidays with the people closest to them. It’s just that those people are less likely to be family.
While family is still very relevant to millennials in the holidays, many are also going to be celebrating them outside the traditional family setting. Being aware of this, and targeting this audience with your marketing efforts, will set you apart for a lot of millennials.
Create Brand-Loyalty with Personality
While bright, shiny, faceless, and massive Apple is still very successful with millennials, most other big corporations just aren’t very popular with this crowd. They look at big businesses and see soulless parasites that are destroying our economy and our planet.
Millennials want to feel connected to the people that they do business with, and they want to feel that those businesses are a force for good in the world. That means that sponsoring part of a Thanksgiving day parade would be significantly less effective than engaging in and publicizing some kind of humanitarian or environmental effort. For example, consider…
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Volunteering
- Funding a local community development project
- Organizing a Trash-pickup or neighborhood Snow-Shoveling event
- Participating in Food Drives
Keep it Affordable
Even though Millennials prefer to gravitate toward high quality, artisan, and environmentally responsible products, they aren’t keen on buying extravagant or numerous items. Being heavily indebted due to the massive increase in the cost of education, the majority of millennials report that the holidays are a serious financial stressor for them.
Millennials are an important consumer demographic, and those who get ahead of the curve and adapt their marketing strategies are ultimately going to capture their loyalty and become the most trusted brands of the future.